Blues of the Birth

The effort to drag Obama to Bush depths

But first, in case you've been vacationing all summer at the bottom
of a lead-lined cave, let me explain what a birther is. A birther is
one of an unknown number of disgruntled losers who cling like drowning
rats on a water-logged coconut to a premise that Pres. Barack Obama
wasn't born on American soil, therefore he is ineligible to be
president of the United States. The true birthers--and by "true" I mean
the ones who actually believe their own gibberish--are invariably
conservative, invariably white and invariably stupid, as Obama's
credentials as an authentically born U.S. citizen have been established
repeatedly since the question was first raised during the campaign. We
cannot be certain what the birthers would have the nation do, even if
it were proven that Obama had been born offshore. If he were
forced to step down by some Constitutional/Supreme Court mandate, would
they be content with Joe Biden as president? Or would they insist that
John McCain take the reins because he was so unfairly thumped by, in
their fevered imaginations, a foreigner?

Those are questions we cannot expect to be answered by "true"
birthers, as anyone capable of believing such doodle-squat would
obviously be incapable of any sort of long-term or even medium-term
thinking. It would be like expecting a batshit-crazy dog to project
what might be Step Two, should he ever actually catch that tail he's
always chasing.

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But frankly, we need not overly concern ourselves with the "true"
birthers. Theirs is the sort of outrage than can be born only in
perpetually troubled minds--minds in which facts and evidence are
overwhelmed by the need to be, and stay, noticed. Don't look for any
sense in what they say. That's not how they operate. Besides, have you
seen their leaders speak? They could start foaming at the mouth at any
moment, eh?

The birthers worth keeping a close eye on are those--many of whom
were elected to Congress from such hotbeds of intellectual activity as
Missouri and Oklahoma--who still refuse to say one way or another
whether they believe Pres. Obama was born American. They go about
belching things like, "Well, there certainly are some unanswered
questions about this matter," or, "At present, I have no evidence Obama
was not born in Hawaii like he claims he was. And until that
evidence turns up, we must suppose he is telling the truth." We might
call them "enablers," as they lend just enough credence to the frothing
turnips in the birther stewpot to keep the issue in the news.

But what do those enablers hope to gain? Some have hinted that, as
so many of these birther-symps are from the South, there is an
inescapable element of racism to their attitude--that they simply
cannot adjust to the reality of not only having a black man as leader
of the nation, but also that he is so superior to their sorry asses in
intellect, achievement, morality or any other measure we might take,
that they all look like cousin-humping, Tobacco Road trailer trash in
comparison.

Yeah ... well ... that, too. There is no reason to think Bible-Belt
Bubbas like Rep. Roy Blunt and Sen. James Inhofe will ever not
consider a man's color first and foremost, and anything else if he
absolutely has to.

Yet I don't consider pure racism to be their primary motive in not
decisively quashing this birther bull. These Congressional enablers are
not stupid--not compared to the people who voted them into office, at
any rate--and they must realize they have lost the Culture Wars of Race
Relations just as decisively as they lost what many of them still refer
to as the War of Northern Aggression. But while they may have given up
on ever turning the calendar back on civil rights (if you don't count
voter disenfranchisement in key precincts), it may not be too late to
reverse the tides that threaten to swamp their floundering political
party.

And how does one go about improving the image of an organization
that has spent almost a decade demonstrating that it is incapable of
managing anything more complicated than a flush toilet? How could they
retool themselves for general consumption when the last tool they sold
us was George Bush? What might they do to make themselves look
better?

It's obvious, isn't it? The only way they could possibly look better
is to make everything around them look worse. And we, the Democrats,
have spent the last eight years providing them with an operator's
manual on how to do just that.

It starts with insisting that there is a lingering doubt in the
legitimacy of the subject's presidency. We had the motivation
that Bush couldn't honestly win his way to the office, so he used
lawyers and screaming thugs to install him. They have nothing so
convincing as Florida 2000, so they had to conjured up a substitute.
Hence ... the birther controversy.

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It goes on. We had the fact that George Bush couldn't deliver
a line without mutilating it so thoroughly that if a child talked that
poorly, concerned parents would send him to speech therapy. They
must have been deeply disappointed when they learned that Obama could
not only pronounce words correctly, but he could organize them into
coherent sentences, too. So they started grumbling about the president
using a Teleprompter.

We had Bush flying over New Orleans, without a hint on his
blank face that he might be troubled so many African-Americans were
dying below. They have the affair of Henry Gates Jr. and the
Cambridge cop to prove that Obama is a racist.

On foreign shores, we had Bush starting unnecessary wars and
getting American servicemen killed for no good reason. They have
Obama apologizing to the world for the destructive brat who preceded
him.

On budgetary matters, we had Bush underestimating the true
price tag of his hobby war--by a factor of 20 multiples. They
have Obama underestimating the success of "Cash for Clunkers."

You see the pattern. For every stupid, thoughtless, costly, immoral
and/or criminal episode from the last administration, they will
scramble their brains to find an equivalent in this administration--to
howl hysterically about an Obama tit for every Bush tat.

And we, the outraged opposition from 2001 to 2009, handed them the
script. Why, before the year is out, I won't be a bit surprised to hear
how Pres. Obama is the "worst president in U.S. history."

And remember ... don't look for any sense to all this. That's not
how they operate.